So like, you could get it from infected bedding if you had a cut, or it rubbed into your eye, or ....
Whether anything helps depends on whether it cuts down on most avenues above.
The sex part is mostly irrelevant, except that it is a very direct avenue to get it into your body vs "being coughed on" or "having cuts".
Chalk this one up to the media - someone identified that the current origination seems to have been a rave or two (or whatever), and that it can transmit sexually, and so now all the stories are about how it transmits by gay sex and blah blah blah. It's clickbait.
In that sense, lots of viruses transmit well by sex, monkeypox is not special or unique, nor is this likely to be the main transmission method as cases increase, even if it was the original transmission method. It has never been the main transmission mechanism of previous outbreaks.
I mean, heck, the fact that the media is focusing on the sex transmission helps guarantees it will transmit effectively the other ways - people think they are safe if they aren't having sex, but they are not!
The one part that isn't well-evaluated is the whole "how far do droplets travel" part. Right now the view of the CDC is that it requires prolonged face-to-face contact to get it that way because droplets can't travel very far (they are pretty heavy). The view of COVID started the same way.
It often ends up rarely that simple ;)
> The virus enters the body primarily through broken skin (even if not visible), or the mucous membranes (eyes, nose, or mouth). Human-to-human transmission is thought to occur primarily through close contact with an infected subject. There are indications that transmission is occurring during sexual intercourse
as far as I know COVID is not transmitted primarily through broken skin, so it does seem more likely to be transmitted through sex.
You are technically correct about covid. However - and this was my point - if you have sex with someone with active, transmissible covid without substantial and properly fit PPE you are probably going to catch covid. It doesn't matter what type of sexual behavior you engage in, or what safer sex precautions that you take. That does not make covid an STI.
Maybe the kind of sex affects the odds of STD transmission too, but I'd expect the number of dicerolls to be the primary factor and to be substantially higher among gay men in general.
TL;DR: Men are easy, some of them are gay too.
With that much risky behavior (with no protection), it is indeed a long series of dice rolls.
Sadly, it is very hard to have serious discussions about such topics nowadays, as one tends to get hit with the homophobia label.
Ride a jet ski wind up in the water.
If the tradeoff wasn't worth it they wouldn't do it.
The relevance really comes down do what question you are trying to answer.
If you want to know what factors have the biggest impact on reducing transmission, you will get one answer.
If you want to know what populations are at higher risk and what are they doing different, you will get another answer.
Not saying you are doing this, but by bringing it up, some people might think that’s what you are doing. I feel like I have seen it often enough that it is a fairly reasonable concern.
Is there a specific reason you are focusing on this issue, out of all of the thousands of issues you could choose to care about?
I am not focusing on it. I am just bringing it up on a thread where it seemed appropriate to. One person can care about more than just one issue at a time.
But the main difference for most in general is just that gay men have vastly more partners in a short period of time. You don’t really have a straight (or lesbian) equivalent of gay bathhouses.
"Prostaglandin E2 in human semen given via anus during anal intercourse may cause an immune dysregulation in the male semen recipients; this immunosuppressive effect of prostaglandin E2 may be one of the underlying factors that stimulate AIDS-associated virus infection or that trigger the latent AIDS-associated virus. This hypothesis is supported by the following experimental results. Anal infusion of prostaglandin E2 or D2 into male rats reduced in vitro responses of T lymphocytes to phytohemagglutinin. However, the T-cell response of female rats was not reduced significantly by the anal infusion of seminal prostaglandins."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3458226/
"This method of alcohol consumption can be dangerous and even deadly because it leads to faster intoxication than drinking since the alcohol is absorbed directly into the bloodstream and bypasses the body's ability to reject the toxin by vomiting."
yes and it is common for gays to have sex with way more partners, way more frequently, without protection, often using drugs. so it's a wonderful way to spread disease. look up the epidemiology of STDs in relation to MSM partner counts, it's eye-opening.
amazes me that people don't actually know the basic facts of this. i suppose this is what happens after two decades of politely not mentioning it -- what goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.
Both gay men and lesbian women prefer oral sex. This is well studied but not widely known because it goes against popular ideas of what counts as sex.
Anal sex is a risk factor for certain diseases, particularly HIV, but monkeypox does not require genital contact (or significant fluid transfer) for spread, so it's not clear if condoms would make much of a difference in this case.
Anal sex occurs at these types of events but is not a dominating activity. People may engage in a wide variety of sexual activities. Some may not have sex at all. My guess is that sex was not a contributing factor, but rather close skin-to-skin contact among a large group of people wearing little more than underwear.
It's also possible the virus could have been spread through "breeding," a practice where one person will be penetrated by multiple people one-after-the-other much like a Tesla supercharger.
But get any group of half-naked people together in close quarters for hours and I am sure any type of virus like monkeypox will spread. As a gay person I would very much like to at least know the most probably theories.
It's very frustrating to see comments further down postulating that a lack of protection is the cause of the virus. Last time I checked, even sex with condoms involves skin contact.
Health authorities don't seem to have learned anything from COVID. The sooner information becomes available, even if the only information is "It could be this but we need to be sure," the better.
In the meantime, the LGBT community will have to deal with this kind of misinformation as well as not knowing how to protect themselves.
That's a rather unusual analogy. I don't recall ever penetrating a supercharger with anything, whether one-after-the-other or not! Is there some part of the joke that I'm missing?
my concern is then, is there a chance for this to become mutated and transmit? Say in a night club, stadium and concerts?